Why would the White House lie and claim that Obama’s withdrawal plan was within the range of options presented to him by Petraeus? I thought the next 18 months were going to be all about Obama going with his gut. Wingin’ it, if you will.

His gut told him that he needs to get reelected, and the easiest way to do that was to yank as many troops as possible out of the country no matter what it might mean for the war. That was the only “range of options” that mattered.

So he winged it.

In response to questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Allen testified that Obama’s decision on the pace and size of Afghanistan withdrawals was “a more aggressive option than that which was presented.”

Graham pressed him. “My question is: Was that a option?”

Allen: “It was not.”

Allen’s claim, which came under oath, contradicts the line the White House had been providing reporters over the past week—that Obama simply chose one option among several presented by General David Petraeus. In a conference call last Wednesday, June 22, a reporter asked senior Obama administration officials about those options. “Did General Petraeus specifically endorse this plan, or was it one of the options that General Petraeus gave to the president?”

The senior administration official twice claimed that the Obama decision was within the range of options the military presented to Obama.

During an interview with Radio Iowa, Thaddeus McCotter said Republicans don’t seem entirely satisfied with the field of candidates who are running.”Or are they looking for something that’s relatively new that they haven’t heard of before? So I think if you want to look at it in kind of an interesting way, you could be very thankful that you’re not a particularly well-known quantity at this point in time because the ones they do know they don’t particularly have an ardor for at this point in time,” McCotter said. “And again, I’m not saying if I get in they’ll love me either, but if you don’t ask, you’ll never know. At least that was the approach I took with my wife when we were dating.”

No, I don’t have a stutter. What I want is justice for the word “justice” itself.

Because, you see, “justice” has been hijacked by the American left and is now their exclusive weapon. It is no longer a politically neutral word; whenever you see the word “justice” — especially preceded by another noun — it invariably is meant to convey some far-left position.

A History of Crimes Against Justice

The degradation of “justice” started with the phrase “social justice,” a concept which was originally only a religious term but which was later adopted (and re-defined) by the American left to have political connotations. Use of the word “justice” as a leftist buzzword was given a big boost in 1971 with the publication of A Theory of Justice by philosopher John Rawls, which focused on “justice” as the axle around which liberal thought rotated.

Let a Hundred Justices Bloom

In the mid-’70s, the end of the Vietnam War deprived the professional left of its main protest topic, so they cast around for something new to whine about. In the absence of any glaringly urgent crisis, such as a war, they settled on a scattershot array of issues which could be unified under the generalized label “social justice.” Any aspect of American society which was insufficiently leftist suddenly needed a good dose of “social justice” to rectify things.